Reply To: Live Chat with Crowdfunder – Friday 17 July

hello this is Amber, programme officer for the Our Place programme. Our Place involves people writing plans on how to develop their approach to helping people within an area (often by getting services to work more closely together). Ideally they will be able to draw down budgets from these services such as police, community commissioning groups etc as their work will save statutory services money.
One group is interested in restorative justice principles at a neighbour level, giving people conflict management skills.

Do you think there would be appetite for crowdfunding for this?

Do you have a targeting marketing? e.g. people interested in conflict management / psychology?

Regardless of whether it was community shares or normal crowdfunding, the issue is the same – are there people who we can persuade that this isn’t just a good idea in general, but who we can convince to make it happen. There’s lots of good ideas that never happen because they’re just not quite ‘salient’ enough to get people to actually roll their sleeves up and make it happen.

So before crowdfunding, you have to have the crowd. Restorative justice projects have beneficiaries in the community, so they’d be one starting point, or perhaps outside a particular community, people who believe in restorative justice and want to see it put into practice and are prepared to support that belief with their own money.